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Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons

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Re: Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons

#161

Post by summm »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #101
titusjohnson wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's also overtones of taxation without representation going on here; individuals can vote, and so they have lower taxes than businesses, which can't vote. I'm confused about this statement. Businesses are comprised of individuals, and those individuals (if citizens) can vote. So the business has a vote through the voice of its employees and representation in government through the people employees at a business…

> Or are you saying the legal fiction of business personhood should give the business a ... vote? That just sounds like business owners (individuals) getting 2 or more votes then... I believe the more common proposal is to resolve the contradiction the other way: remove taxes on corporations, as the individuals comprising the corporations generally already pay taxes. That would be politically quite unpopular, but the…

If at the same time corporations lost their status as legal persons, I'd be very interested in your proposal.

Re: Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons

#162

Post by noizejoy »

cgriswald wrote: post #155
noizejoy wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I prefer to see judges and lawyers as safety valves for mitigating badly written legislation.

You've misunderstood if you think your idea is mutually exclusive with mine.

Fair enough, maybe I read your post as more absolutist than intended.

Re: Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons

#163

Post by setr »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #151
magicalhippo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Norway we have the infamous "E6 ham". We have an import tax on dry-cured ham[1], but not unprocessed meat. Someone figured out it was cheaper then to import unprocessed meat from Spain to Norway, turn the truck around as soon as they were customs cleared and drive the 3000 km or so back to Spain for curing. Once cured they'd re-import the processed meat, which now has a different tariff due to being "Norwegia…

A lesson for anyone implementing metrics and incentives

Well, it still did its job of increasing cost of external cured ham… just by not as much of an increase, or as directly, as they intended

Re: Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons

#164

Post by pomian »

rasz wrote: post #150
sparkling wrote: post #69

Something similar: for the original Playstation 2 that was sold in the EU, Sony included a DVD with a BASIC interpreter to classify the console as a personal computer. This little hack avoided some EU import taxes back in the day. https://www.theregister.com/2000/11/07/sony_adds_basic_to_pl...

Same with 29.59 min video recording limit on tons of cameras. https://www.borrowlenses.com/blog/video-recording-limits-in-... "In 2006, the European Union created a law that added an import duty of 5-12% to any video camera. What determined whether a camera was a video camera? In short, the ability to record longer than 30 minutes. Thus, companies like Canon and Nikon decided to cap their video clip lengths, preventi…

I always wondered about that limit. There were many stories going around about hardware, memory limits, but this sounds much more believable.

Re: Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons

#165

Post by acdha »

Gigachad wrote: post #125
acdha wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preferred, but you often need more nuance than that — for example, if a carbon tax is set high enough to deter profitable heavy industrial activities it would require care not to have a disproportionate impact on people who depend on cars, non-electric heating, etc. Those can be mitigated, of course, but it starts to make the tax policy a lot more complicated. The other problem is that we probably had time for a carb…

Carbon taxes are set up so they cancel regular taxes. So if you use the average amount of greenhouse gasses, you come out equal, if you use more than the average, you come out worse, and if you use less than the average you come out better. So overnight not a whole lot changes but everyone enters a race to use the least greenhouse gasses.

The problem is that people are starting from wildly variable positions. An old person on a fixed income can’t afford to replace their heating, add insulation, etc. quickly unless we have programs to help them; a rich guy who thinks gas is better for cooking or heating up his outdoor dining will blow off the minor increase; etc.

The problem is that we wasted 3+ decades on denialism and a lot of pollution comes from things with long service lives. A high-pollution SUV will be polluting in 2040, maybe 2050; a gas or oil heater might run into 2070. At this point we need more than gradual nudges — things like requiring special permits to buy new fossil fuel-burning equipment with heavy subsidies and 0% loans for installing electric alternatives.

Re: Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons

#167

Post by cgriswald »

JohnBooty wrote: post #152
cgriswald wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer judges and lawyers interpret what the law says, not what they believe lawmakers meant to say. It is lawmakers responsibility to craft quality laws. Such hacks expose weaknesses in the laws as written. Edit: ... when successful.

Ideally: sure! In reality: are you a software engineer? Or do you know one? Surely you (or they) have experienced how difficult it is to write code that manages even a small number of inputs? Even 10 different yes/no inputs give you 1,024 possibilities. Now imagine writing laws to precisely cover an effectively infinite number of possibilities, many of which don't exist at the time the law is written, and expecting t…

An interpreter tries to understand what your code means. It doesn't try to guess at your intentions. (Pedantically, some do, but on a limited scale.) You should write quality code. You should try to anticipate edge cases. Your code will fail sometimes. You'll fix it.

Law has the advantage of much more advanced interpreters; but judges should still be interpreting the law, not guessing at the minds of the people who wrote the law. Lawmakers should be writing quality laws and fixing problems.

Re: Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons

#168

Post by majormajor »

cgriswald wrote: post #167
JohnBooty wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally: sure! In reality: are you a software engineer? Or do you know one? Surely you (or they) have experienced how difficult it is to write code that manages even a small number of inputs? Even 10 different yes/no inputs give you 1,024 possibilities. Now imagine writing laws to precisely cover an effectively infinite number of possibilities, many of which don't exist at the time the law is written, and expecting t…

An interpreter tries to understand what your code means. It doesn't try to guess at your intentions. (Pedantically, some do, but on a limited scale.) You should write quality code. You should try to anticipate edge cases. Your code will fail sometimes. You'll fix it. Law has the advantage of much more advanced interpreters; but judges should still be interpreting the law, not guessing at the minds of the people who w…

Yes, you should try to write quality code.

Yet almost everyone fails.

You should also try to write quality laws. But when you fail, do you want the same sort of consequences as with code? How much time, effort, and money has been lost to hacks taking advantage of errors in code?

I would love an interpreter/compiler/processor that knew that I didn't intend to allow a security vulnerability so anyone could escalate their privileges. Sounds great, truly.

Re: Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons

#169

Post by michaelmrose »

notch656a wrote: post #134
mc32 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was pretty transparent that they did that to circumvent regulation. Imagine Coca-Cola getting clearance for importing coca leaves for flavoring but then instead sells it to a third party who processes it for something else.

Am I the only one that sees no problem with that? Why the hell should coca-cola be responsible for what someone else does with coca leaves?

Presumably because the would logically accept such a duty as an alternative to the government telling them they aren't allowed to import it at all.

Re: Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons

#170

Post by majormajor »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #101
titusjohnson wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's also overtones of taxation without representation going on here; individuals can vote, and so they have lower taxes than businesses, which can't vote. I'm confused about this statement. Businesses are comprised of individuals, and those individuals (if citizens) can vote. So the business has a vote through the voice of its employees and representation in government through the people employees at a business…

> Or are you saying the legal fiction of business personhood should give the business a ... vote? That just sounds like business owners (individuals) getting 2 or more votes then... I believe the more common proposal is to resolve the contradiction the other way: remove taxes on corporations, as the individuals comprising the corporations generally already pay taxes. That would be politically quite unpopular, but the…

If we remove the taxes on corporations should we also remove the shield on liability against the owners of the corporation? Why make it more transparent one way but not the other?
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